Populist hero
There’s a lot of paradox here.
[Stephen] Miller told Fox News: “Harvard has engaged in decades of invidious, unlawful and illegal race-based discrimination against American citizens … The Democrat party’s philosophy right now is for foreigners, everything – for Americans, nothing.”
Jason Johnson, a political scientist at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, said: “Their goal is to intimidate and break down institutions of higher learning in America because that is where most of the resistance to their authoritarian tendencies is going to come from.”
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Other commentators detect an element of class warfare. Trump won election last November with a base drawing largely on non-college-educated white men. Now he is stoking hostility towards the ivory towers of the US’s most elite university.
It’s such a weird twisted turned inside out kind of class warfare though. Trump with his billions and golf resorts and gold shoelaces is a bizarre candidate for working class hero…but the US has a long history of swapping realities for symbols. Trump is enormously rich but he gets to play the class game in his favor because he is so ignorant and crude and trashy. It’s all surface and nothing underneath. He doesn’t give a good god damn about the working class, but he does love to make war on intelligent people for the edification of his “base.” He’s all hat and no cattle, all symbol and no substance. And it works for him.
Brendan Boyle, a Democratic representative who graduated from Harvard in 2005, said: “Part of Trump’s political skill is figuring out how to portray himself as this working man’s populist hero even though he’s a billionaire who pisses in gold toilets.”
Exactly so. It’s infuriating, and it keeps going and going and going.
I don’t know if it’s a skill so much as it is just how Trump is. But it works for him either way. They assume that’s how he is, and love him for it, because he hates everyone they hate. Even if he is deploying a skill, figuring out how to position himself, he still looks like he is who he is. I think he is; I don’t think it’s a skill. I think he decided to run for President, and just said whatever came into his mind, and just kept saying it whenever people applauded. And the non-college educated white man eats it up, because he has believed for a long time the equation that someone else having rights = him losing rights. Those who see it as a zero-sum game want to make sure they are not the zero.
Captain Bonespurs, aka Trump, approved of all and sundry except himself in the US fighting in Vietnam, 1965-75. With the massive US defeat in Vietnam, its prestige went down the gurgler, hence Trump’s MAGA campaign to put things back in order; and his own following of people as childishly ignorant as himself. It seems that a large swath of those followers would march obediently over a cliff at his command, even though Trump himself would find reason to step aside and not get involved himself on the wrong side of gravity.
It was ever thus with populists: Don’t do as I do. Do as I say.
Didn’t Trump and his father engage in “decades of invidious, unlawful and illegal race-based discrimination against American citizens” when they kept Black people from renting apartments in their properties?
Why yes, yes they did.
It’s BOTH a skill AND a personality disorder. Quite the accomplishment!